Youth participate in the anti-government protests in Karatina town, Nyeri County, on July 23, 2024.
A poignant historical witticism says “youth is wasted on the young.” I’ve never come across a more boneheaded “wise” saying. The phrase is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, the Irish polemicist, playwright, and critic. It means that young people often don’t appreciate, understand, or fully take advantage of the benefits of youth. Whatever the origin, the phrase is a numbskull’s misunderstanding of the youth and their role in society.
There’s a good reason why societies are inter-generational. Each generation has a purpose. No duplication, or redundancy, is needed. The role of the youth, unlike the graybeards and grayheads, is to dream big – even about nonsensical pie in the sky – and push society to imagine a larger destiny.
A society whose youth is simply practical, and doesn’t go on flights of fancy, has no future. It’s a calcified, mummified, comatose society. A dead polity. That’s why societies should welcome the rebellion, nay, the revolt of the youth. That’s where the society’s well springs eternal.
The late Professor Okoth-Ogendo, my one-time teacher and dean at the School of Law of the University of Nairobi, once told me that he was afraid of being too radical in his youth for fear that he would be too conservative in his old age. But as it turned out, the good professor was neither of the two in his youth, or dotage. He was a quintessential moderate, middle-roader, a jolly good fella.
Cautious intellects
Prof Okoth-Ogendo lived a life of balance, avoiding the two extremes. Even so, his most remarkable contributions were in the labour of the intellect. His mind was dominant in the science of law. But most cautious intellects, unlike him, don’t leave a mark on society. They don’t even merit a footnote in history.
In my view, the youth should be very radical while the generations in their twilight should be wise and restrained. But the wisdom of the elders is to realise the historic role of the youth, and allow their progeny to see the world anew. That’s why the handwringing of our grizzled citizens about the “impudence” of Gen Zs is total “trash” as they would say.
Societies of opportunity, as opposed to those of restraint and conservatism, allow their youth to dance on the precipice of the cliff, and even tip over, if they so choose. There’s a reason among many why America became the most powerful and inventive society in human history. It’s because Americans take impossible, sometimes nutty, chances to do the unthinkable. Imagine, for example, Nik Wallenda, the daredevil who walked across atop Niagara Falls, New York, on a tightrope. That’s not for the faint of heart. Remember the Wight brothers born in Dayton, Ohio with only a high school education, yet they invented the airplane. Societies must dream, or perish. And it’s often the youth who dream and dare for society.
For me, I celebrate the coming out of Gen Zs in Kenya’s journal of finding a nation of opportunity. I had been anxiously awaiting their entry onto the national stage. I was holding my breath that they wouldn’t just stop at twerking on TikTok. Instead, they used social media to take Kenya by storm. We all know the plain truths about our country. Kenya is the land of official impunity and corruption. We’ve become a society which eats our young. We celebrate the most decrepit people, and elect them into office. We’ve been killing the soul of our society in a most demonic way. Those with power primitively accumulate wealth without limit. They steal the future of our young, and hence of the country.
Spirit snatchers
Kenya is a country of spirit snatchers. That’s why the elite and the wealthy are afraid of Gen Zs. Instead of harvesting the constructive and idealism of the youth, our elites sought to bottle it up, and kill it. But the youth have reset our society’s expectations and norms of governance.
They have defrocked the nakedness of the state and the rulers. The risk for the rulers and the elite is to take the lull of protests as the death of their motivating impetus. That would be a grave mistake. Don’t go back to business as usual because the next explosion may be cataclysmic. Let’s take this opportunity to clean up the nation’s soul and re-imagine Kenya’s destiny.
I end where I started. In 1789, on the final day of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia when the American Constitution was adopted, Benjamin Franklin, one of its key authors told a crowd outside Independence Hall that Americans now had “a republic, if you can keep it.” In Kenya, we have a republic. But can we keep it?
The Gen Z protests were not a coup or a revolution. It was an uprising, a revolt by the most idealistic demographic in our society. It’s their lived experiences, not their consciousness that brought them to this point. We are destroying them. Let’s reset. Or we shall perish together.
Prof Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. @makaumutua.
